Khabibulin had those post-Christmas blues again

Nikolai Khabibulin's post-Christmas performance has been hide-your-eyes bad the past two seasons.

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With the exception of one blistering hot month, Nikolai Khabibulin’s time in Edmonton has not been a happy one. The Russian veteran was signed to a four year contract on 2009 July 1 to take over the departing Dwayne Roloson’s spot as Oilers’ #1 goalie. Three years into the (or)deal, the ‘Bulin Wall has not proven to be the answer, at least not to the original question.

The first year, Khabibulin didn’t survive the end of November before his season was ended by a back problem; in his absence two rookies took on water behind a bad team. The two subsequent years NK remained healthy for all but a handful of games each season, but his performance cratered in the second half of both years, especially in terms of team results.

In 2010-11 Khabibulin returned from his back woes as the clear #1, seeing most of the game action while the previous year’s replacement tandem duelled it out for the back-up’s role. Devan Dubnyk ultimately won the job and Jeff Deslauriers was sent out. After suffering a groin problem, a rested NK returned to a brief hot streak in early December, but after Christmas his results deteriorated significantly. Dubnyk gradually took on more of the workload.

Interesting that Khabibulin’s goal-against average stayed flat at 3.40, even as the team cut down the amount of rubber he was seeing by more than 5 pucks a game. His save percentage went from bad to worst, and the Oilers came out on the losing end of 22 of his 24 starts. Two wins! Yowsa.

Dubnyk meanwhile also saw a significant reduction in shots, but maintained his already-excellent save percentage and posted respectable numbers right across the board, especially on a last-place team.

This past season saw an large shift of performance by both netminders, an extreme one in the case of Khabibulin, who started the season as a backup determined to recover the starting job. Khabi came out of the gate like a goalie possessed, determined to put his physical and personal woes behind him and display the form that had made him one of the league’s elite stoppers over substantial segments of the past decade and a half. For a month he could stop a BB fired from point blank range, allowing only nine goals in his first nine games while not losing any of them outright. He wasn’t just hot, he was incandescent. He shut down top teams like the Preds and Blues, blanked the Rangers and Kings, capped the Caps, knocked off the ‘nucks, and Khabbed the Habs. He had the temporarily-faithful at Rexall Place chanting his name, while I in my living room was prone to occasional outbursts of the Khabibulin Chorus (music: Handel; lyric: McCurdy).

Alas, “incandescent” ends in “descent”, and there was nowhere to go but down when the flare ran out of steam. Khabi couldn’t continue at that level of course, no one could. Who did he think he was? Brian Elliot??

Khabibulin had been so far out front of the stats curve that his numbers continued to look good even as his play trailed off from brilliant to decent to sporadic to generally lousy, and were still respectable on the percentage side of the equation when the season mercifully ended, about five months too late. Let’s look at the same splits:

Again I’ve felt obliged to highlight the dreadful post-Christmas numbers across the board for Khabibulin. One that especially stands out is the lonely one under “W”. Yowsa, again.

Dubnyk meanwhile recovered from his only poor-ish segment of the four under study here and came on gangbusters, wresting the #1 job back with authority. In the closing months he was a goal a game better, and his save percentage was superior by about ⅓. He managed to win 16 games backstopping the same team behind which Khabibulin faltered.

Just because I can’t resist rubbernecking at a train wreck, I lumped the same splits into two-year totals. The results are spectacular:

Forty-two starts. Three Oiler wins. I think it’s safe to say “Khabibulin” is not Russian for “Happy New Year”.

That’s half a season worth of decisions for pete’s sake, in the New NHL where “Wins” get handed out in each and every game. 3 out of 42? Even the 1974-75 Washington Capitals won 8 of 80.

I realize goalie wins are largely panned as a team stat applied inappropriately to one individual, but how the hell is one supposed to interpret 3-33-6?

I came up with a couple of takes, not necessarily incompatible. 1) He was the worst goalie in the league. 2) He was under-motivated, if not anti-motivated.

The first can be shown statistically, but the second cannot be. I know “clutch” is a controversial subject, but how about “anti-clutch”? What happens to a guy nominally brought in to win big games, if there aren’t any big games? Especially, what about in the case of a tanking rebuilding team? The road to salvation is through higher draft position. Arguably, the big games are ones like that 5-3 home loss to Montreal a month ago, a game that had direct implications on tonight’s draft lottery.

I’m not saying it was anything deliberate; motivation is a complex matter, especially in a complicated environment where half the fans want you to lose. For sure, both years the writing was on the wall by Christmas that this team wasn’t going to be making the playoffs, and that alone could serve as a heavy demotivator for veterans especially. Not just veteran goalies, either. When there is a greater payoff to your team to lose than to win, that’s a powerful disincentive.

To Tom Renney’s credit, he has shifted the workload from the veteran to the youngster in the latter stages of both seasons, though an argument could be made that a 30-18 split in starts after Xmas 2011 was less severe than it ought to have been. Easy to say in hindsight, although the performance curves of both goalies were such that Khabibulin had the better-looking percentages all along, indeed they were pretty much a wash in the final numbers. Nonetheless, it seemed obvious from this distance that the two stoppers were passing each other as inevitably as if they were on opposed escalators.

Still, there are worse places the organization could be. They have an emerging #1 goalie whose age and performance are both trending in the right direction, a fading veteran with a reputation as a good teammate and just one year to go on his contract, and another prominent seat at a pretty important table tonight.

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